To be a modern Republican in good standing, you have to believe — or pretend to believe — in two miracle cures for whatever ails the economy: more tax cuts for the rich and more drilling for oil. And with prices at the pump on the rise, so is the chant of “Drill, baby, drill.” More and more, Republicans are telling us that gasoline would be cheap and jobs plentiful if only we would stop protecting the environment and let energy companies do whatever they want.

In place of the news round up today, I’m excerpting Paul Krugman excellent op-ed, “Natural Born Drillers.” The Nobel-prize winning economist debunks popular but fact-free right-wing myths:

Thus Mitt Romney claims that gasoline prices are high not because of saber-rattling over Iran, but because President Obama won’t allow unrestricted drilling in the Gulf of Mexico and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Meanwhile, Stephen Moore of The Wall Street Journal tells readers that America as a whole could have a jobs boom, just like North Dakota, if only the environmentalists would get out of the way.

The irony here is that these claims come just as events are confirming what everyone who did the math already knew, namely, that U.S. energy policy has very little effect either on oil prices or on overall U.S. employment. For the truth is that we’re already having a hydrocarbon boom, with U.S. oil and gas production rising and U.S. fuel imports dropping. If there were any truth to drill-here-drill-now, this boom should have yielded substantially lower gasoline prices and lots of new jobs. Predictably, however, it has done neither.

Outside of the WSJ editorial page, though, even the newspaper itself doesn’t buy this nonsense (see Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal and Koch-Fueled Cato Agree: “It’s Not Obama’s Fault That Crude Oil Prices Have Increased”).  Nor does the public (see Poll: 66% Blame Big Oil and MidEast Countries For High Gas Prices, 23% Blame Obama).

Here’s more from Krugman:

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Solar power is advancing at a remarkable rate. Major investments by the Obama administration and much greater investment by the Chinese government have accelerated competition, driving down prices for high-quality solar modules. Installation of solar projects in China has exploded. In China, 195 projects, with a total capacity of over 1.8 GW, will be installed within 2011, comparable to installations in the United States. In today’s New York Times, Paul Krugman describes how the fossil fuel industry and its allies are attacking solar’s success:

We are, or at least we should be, on the cusp of an energy transformation, driven by the rapidly falling cost of solar power. That’s right, solar power. If that surprises you, if you still think of solar power as some kind of hippie fantasy, blame our fossilized political system, in which fossil fuel producers have both powerful political allies and a powerful propaganda machine that denigrates alternatives. [...]

Let’s face it: a large part of our political class, including essentially the entire G.O.P., is deeply invested in an energy sector dominated by fossil fuels, and actively hostile to alternatives. This political class will do everything it can to ensure subsidies for the extraction and use of fossil fuels, directly with taxpayers’ money and indirectly by letting the industry off the hook for environmental costs, while ridiculing technologies like solar.

Solar powered-electricity is getting close to the price of coal-fired electricity, Krugman notes. “And if we priced coal-fired power right, taking into account the huge health and other costs it imposes, it’s likely that we would already have passed that tipping point.”

Krugman:  ”It would have forced firms to spend on upgrading or replacing equipment, helping to boost demand. Yes, it would have cost money — but that’s the point! And with corporations sitting on lots of idle cash, the money spent would not, to any significant extent, come at the expense of other investment.“

The Nobel prize-winning economist, Paul Krugman, had a great piece on his blog Saturday, “Broken Windows, Ozone, and Jobs.”

This was the same point I was (briefly) making in my Friday post on Obama’s dreadful decision: “The standard would not have any noticeable negative impact on the economy and, if anything, would have driven investment and innovation even in the short term.”

Krugman explains why this is especially the case in the severe economic downturn we are now in:

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Now, we don’t know who will win next year’s presidential election. But the odds are that one of these years the world’s greatest nation will find itself ruled by a party that is aggressively anti-science, indeed anti-knowledge. And, in a time of severe challenges — environmental, economic, and more — that’s a terrifying prospect.

Paul Krugman had a terrific column in the New York Times Sunday, “Republicans Against Science.”  He discusses not just the anti-science nature of the GOP  as it applies to global warming, but their anti-knowledge approach as it applies to economic theory.

Here’s more:

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Ohio EPA Proposes Pollution Limits on Fracking

Companies drilling for oil and natural gas in shale formations in Ohio might soon face air pollution limits on new wells.

The practice of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” in pursuit of gas can require multiple wells on a single site, creating a concentration of equipment that can leak hazardous airborne compounds, The Columbus Dispatch reported. That’s causing concern about the pollutants the drilling operations might release, and the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency has proposed requiring oil and gas drillers to get permits that would set pollution limits.

“This is no longer the individual little well you see out in farm fields,” Ohio EPA spokesman Mike Settles said. “This is a sizable operation with pieces of equipment that need to be covered by an air permit.”

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Why does society seem incapable of grappling with the destructive threat of global warming? From the perspective of climate scientists, the question of whether fossil fuel pollution puts modern civilization in jeopardy is a solved problem. Now scientists are spending their efforts on observing the results of the global experiment, tracking just how the increase in climatic entropy disrupts the planet’s ecosystem, and arguing whether we’ve passed tipping points into runaway global warming (thus necessitating doomsday geo-engineering exercises) or whether there’s still time to limit the damage (to a few thousand species and a dozen low-GDP nations) by the complete elimination of fossil fuels within a few decades.

The consensus economic view, however, is profoundly different. Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman inadvertently shows the sorry state of the understanding by economists of global warming in a recent blog post, in which he writes down a “toy model that hopefully clarifies the issues” of climate policy:

See! The problem can be boiled down to three straight lines, intersecting at the optimal balance of economic and environmental impacts. This level of understanding is about as developed as recognizing that burning fossil fuels could heat up the atmosphere, which physicists realized in 1896, 114 years ago.

Unfortunately, Krugman’s toy is actually better than most economic thinking.

Business-as-usual projections used by the federal government, such as the Energy Information Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Labor, and the Congressional Budget Office, don’t take into account climate disruption, which comes in the form of temporary, regional catastrophes (a flood, storm, hurricane, heat wave, wildfire), widespread catastrophes (collapse of coral reefs and forests, decadal drought), and possibly global catastrophe (several feet of sea level rise, permanent El Nino, permafrost melt). The International Energy Agency has only begun to do so in its most recent world energy outlook.

Popular economic models for climate policy, such as Dr. William Nordhaus’s DICE model, use climate damage formulas that have no basis in reality, maxing out at 10% reductions in GDP under runaway global warming ten times what has already been experienced. Citing such models, Congressional Budget Office chief Doug Elmendorf testified that the U.S. economy would be “relatively insulated from climate effects” from 4-6°C warming — at least 500% more warming than present. His “pessimistic estimate” of the damages? Three percent of GDP.

Krugman also writes about the work of Harvard economist Martin Weitzman:

As for the welfare sensitivity: Marty Weitzman has managed to scare me, by pointing out that there’s a pretty plausible case that a rise of 5 degrees C – which is no longer an outlandish prediction – would be utterly catastrophic. You don’t have to be sure about this; just a significant probability is enough.

Climate scientists have come to the consensus that a rise of more than 2 degrees C — about three times present warming — would be utterly catastrophic, and repeatedly caution that even that threshold is not necessarily safe. It is frankly baffling that even the best economists studying climate policy have the fantasy that modern human civilization has a reasonable possibility of sustaining 5 degrees C of warming without suffering on an unprecedented scale.

There are beginning efforts by the federal government to at least include some assessment of the cost of carbon pollution in its analyses, using a “social cost of carbon” in new energy regulations. But even this crude mechanism isn’t factored into policy where it’s really needed, such as the Departments of Treasury and Defense.

That said, Paul Krugman is orders more brilliant than I can even fathom, and back-of-the-napkin calculations can be a powerful tool, if the scribbles are the result of a brilliant mind. For example, climate scientist Stephen Schneider praises the effectiveness of “simple simulations of complex models” in his excellent book “Science as a Contact Sport.” Schneider, by the way, has been considering the prospect of doomsday geoengineering since 1996.